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JAMStack: Improving Web App Performance and Security

By Dick Weisinger

A new style of app development is gaining in popularity: JAMStack. It is a kind of software architecture and philosophy. ‘JAM’ stands for Javascript, APIs and Markup.

The Markup in JAMStacks refers to static markup deployed with the app from the server. On the client, the markup is dynamically changed with Javascript. The static HTML guarantees that there is some content delivered to the client that will render, even if the APIs malfunction. The approach of starting with a static base page and then dynamically modifying it is called ‘progressive enhancement’.

The APIs of JAM provide the dynamic content to the page. Increasingly JAMStack APIs are provided as serverless URLs.

The advantage of the JAMStack approach is that it offers very good performance, scalability, security, discoverability, and resilience. Once deployed, the application also takes significantly less resources to maintain.

Mathias Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, said that “we coined the term ‘Jamstack’ in 2015 to better define what developers were already starting to do – decouple the front and backend web and apps, focus on best practices of speed and availability, and redefine their workflows. With the continued growth of tools and services in this community ecosystem, along with so many powerful web properties redefining how developers can do more with less, the next wave of web development is here, and it’s the Jamstack.”

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